This is why they have always gravitated toward the most unexpurgated editions of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales they can get their hands on, despite adult efforts to bowdlerize the sex and violence.
|
|
No matter what honorable ends you tell yourself you have in sight, if you're finding yourself having to bowdlerize the description of your work, you are in a morally perilous place and should urgently reconsider what you're doing.
|
|
But those same films, along with the broader impulse to "bowdlerize" or modify movies for content issues, have been at the center of a number of controversies in the past quarter-century, from heated arguments among movie executives and directors to full-on legal battles.
|
|
It is after her son Thomas, the editor of The Family Shakspeare, that the term "bowdlerize" is named.
|
|
The verb bowdlerise (or bowdlerize)American/British spelling differences: "-ize" is preferred in American English whereas "-ise" is the form used elsewhere. has linked his name with the censorship or omission of elements deemed inappropriate for children, not only in literature but also in motion pictures and television programmes.
|
|
He described Two-Faced Woman as "an occasion of sin ... dangerous to public morals", The Miracle (which led to Joseph Burstyn, Inc v. Wilson) as a "vile and harmful picture ... a despicable affront to every Christian", and Baby Doll as "revolting" and "morally repellent". His condemnation of Forever Amber caused producer William Perlberg to publicly refuse to "bowdlerize the film to placate the Roman Catholic Church". He was instrumental in getting William Brennan appointed to the Supreme Court in 1956, but would later regret the decision.
|
|
Which of these items are capitalized may be merely conventional. Abrahamic, Buddhist, Hollywoodize, Freudianism, and Reagonomics are capitalized; quixotic, bowdlerize, mesmerism, and pasteurization are not; aeolian and alpinism may be capitalized or not. Some words or some homonyms (depending on how a body of study defines "word") have one meaning when capitalized and another when not. Sometimes the capitalized variant is a proper noun (the Moon; dedicated to God; Smith's apprentice) and the other variant is not (the third moon of Saturn; a Greek god; the smith's apprentice).
|
|
The decision to bowdlerize the OSPD's third edition by removing a large number of possibly offensive words necessitated a separate, unabridged word list for tournament use. The first edition of OWL was created by the NSA Dictionary Committee, chaired by John Chew, and took effect on March 2, 1998. To avoid controversy, it was available for sale only to NSA members, and unlike the OSPD, did not include definitions. To provide additional value for tournament players, the OWL includes words whose base or inflected forms have up to nine letters, rather than the OSPD's eight.
|
|
Taking a much more moderate stance than Whiteing, the opinion of whom The National describes as "flagrant exaggeration", they instead suggest that The Family Shakespeare is a relic of a bygone, pre-Victorian time, and that "As public taste moved on towards broader standards of literary propriety, the verb 'to bowdlerize' suffered corresponding degradation." Nonetheless, they acknowledge that public opinion of Bowdler and bowdlerization as a practice is perhaps best represented Whiteing's strong views. By 1925 The Family Shakespeare was all but obsolete. In 1969 Noel Perrin published Dr. Bowdler's Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America.
|
|
The Bowdler name took on a life of its own soon after the publication of the 1818 second edition: by the mid 1820s, around the time of Thomas Bowdler's death, it had already become a verb, "to bowdlerize", meaning to remove sensitive or inappropriate material from a text. However, at this time it was not yet a byword for literary censorship; rather, it was more of a genre of books edited to be appropriate for young readers or for families, and a very popular and successful genre at that. The tides began to change for the Bowdler name in 1916, when the writer Richard Whiteing decried the sanitized edition in an article for The English Review entitled "Bowdler Bowdlerised". In the scathing and oft-sarcastic piece, Whiteing utterly denounces Bowdler and his expurgations, calling the changes "inconsistent" and scorning the prefaces to the more difficult-to-edit plays as "mealy-mouthed attempts to right himself".
|
|